소비자의 프라이버시 염려와 챗봇의 언어 스타일이 추천서비스의 설득효과에 미치는 영향

Consumers’ privacy concerns considerably impact the persuasiveness of artificial intelligence’s (AI) recommendations of products for consumers in online shopping. Consumers with high privacy concerns may be hesitant to share or refuse to provide personal data for personalized recommendations. This decreases the precision of AI recommendations and, consequently, consumer satisfaction. This study aims to propose a chatbot language style suitable for consumers with privacy concerns to improve the persuasiveness of the chatbot’s recommendation service. In other words, this study examined the effect of the consumers’ privacy concerns and the chatbot language style on the intention to accept a recommendation service. In Study 1, consumers with high privacy concerns were more likely to accept the chatbot’s recommendation when the chatbot’s language was formal (vs. informal). However, low privacy concerns in consumers did not have a significant effect on their intention to accept the chatbot’s recommendation by chatbot's language style, whether formal or informal. Relevant previous studies (Garbarino & Strahilevitz, 2004; Hoy & Milne, 2010) examining the relationship between privacy concerns and gender have demonstrated that women are more concerned than men about personal information infringement and exhibit more active defensive behaviors. Accordingly, Study 2 investigated the interaction between the consumer’s gender and the language type of the chatbot for the recommendation service’s persuasiveness. Consequently, the same pattern was observed as in Study 1. This study provides academic and practical implications that the appropriate use of the chatbot language style, which is a communication element, can elicit positive responses from consumers to chatbot services.